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Wednesday, September 21, 2011

One week later...

I am happy to report that Tegan is recovering awesomely (is that a word) from his surgery. It has been one week and I am so glad to see him improving everyday. He has spent the last 7 days resting & laying around a lot but his spunk is starting to return.

I can tell a difference in his head tilt already but it is still very hard to tell if we got the results we wanted from the surgery. I guess we can't rush it b/c she did say that it can take six months to a year to fully recover from this surgery. The plus is that he isn't tilting his head to the left at all anymore. He use to have a pretty major left side head tilt to see well. The negative to this is that it seems to me that his vision isn't as good as it was before the surgery. Now I don't want to jump the gun on that b/c it can take up to 3 weeks for the brain to adjust and relearn what it should see from the new position but I'm just a little worried about it. He just isn't seeing very well when things are far off or directly on the ground in front of him. I have also noticed him tilting his head to the right a little which is totally not what we want and will defeat the whole purpose of the surgery. Well actually, we don't want the head tilt or the vision loss!

I'm just trying to stop testing him daily and just give it some time but it is very hard to do. It isn't everyday your kid has his eyeballs turned to a different direction!!!

He is eating, drinking and playing again. His eyes are wide open. They are still very red but nothing compared to what they were. In fact they have improved a lot over the last 24 hours. The only real trouble we seem to be having is in the mornings when he wakes up his eyes are somewhat stuck to together and it takes him a while to get them open. Plus he is sensitive to light in the mornings but after about an hour of adjusting and getting his eyes open...he is good to go!

Here is what his eyes looked like last Friday....

And this is what it looked like yesterday....

Sorry for the bad quality, he wouldn't let me use the flash.

I took him yesterday to his school to see his class. I did it to somewhat ease the blow for him just in case his eyes don't improve. As kids do, most of his class was shocked to see his red eyes but it didn't seem to bother him. However it did bother him when we were leaving and ran in to my nephews kindergarten class. My nephew asked what happened to his eyes and that prompted the entire class of strange kids to turn around and start making comments about his eyes which it totally normal I know. He got really shy, asked me to hold him, and buried his head in my shoulder. He kept asking why everyone was looking at his eyes. My prayer is that they clear up a whole lot over the next 4 or 5 days before he goes back to school. His pre-k teacher is really awesome and has showed lots of concern for him. She has also been great about preparing the class for Teg's red eyes and talking to them about him. I really do love that she seems to already care a lot for Tegan.

Hopefully by next week things will get back in to their regular routine around here. I don't know about you but I thrive on routine....even if I hate it!!!